E-Commerce/CMS framework advie

Hi all,

I am just wandering if I can get some advice on the best framework for e-commerce and cms. I will be redeveloping a website for a client of mine which has needs for both a cms and e-commerce integration.

Apart from a custom written solution, I havent really found a decent framework for combining the two. From what I understand Magento is still lacking in a decent cms and I'm not sure wordpress e-commerce plugins I have looked at will be suitable for an e-commerce solution.

The biggest things I require are Shipping Module, Tax Module, Recurring/Subscription payments (non automated) with renewal reminders (similar functionality to purchasing a magazine subscription for example), Donations, Ease of use and simplicity, simple Membership module with manual annual renewal and all the other standard e-commerce functionalities like multiple payment gateway choices etc..

The possibilities I have thought of so far are:

- Wordpress with wordpress e-commerce plugins (Cart66, WP-Ecommerce or Shopp)
- Magento and with some sort of CMS plugin. (I have also looked aheadWorks Subscription and recurring payments module)
- Magento and Wordpress together (wordpress for the content requirements / magento for e-commerce)
- Joomla with VirtueMart.
- CS-Cart (I have ruled this out pretty much because it doesn't not implement recurring payments very well)

I would never use blogging software (like wordpress) for a shop, or for anything but blogging. (i probably made someone mad now :P). I worked ones with magenta and I hate it. That being said. Have you tried joomla(cms) & virtuemart(component)? I know quite some shops that run successfully on that. You might want to try it out.

-edit: let me add why I hate magenta. My experience was that it was very slow even on their own demo site. Also I found it hard to customize things. I helped some people with joomla and virtuemart and it was quite easy to modify things and it ran smoothly.

When it comes to E-Commerce, it's a lot easier to recommend software to avoid:
* oscommerce (and anything based on it) - the source code is an absolute nightmare
* Zen Cart (same reasons as oscommerce)
* X-Cart - the interface is poorly designed and the English translation is not great
* anything that is a WordPress plugin - WordPress has a terrible backend architecture, and most of the shopping cart plugins for it embrace that wholeheartedly; plus the code quality of WordPress plugins on average is pretty bad

Take from another thread:

You might want to consider using Magento, which has terrible performance and an ungodly complex architecture, but also provides nearly every feature and the kitchen sink out of the box, is free, and has a pretty good default UI for both the front-end and the back-end. Code quality is not amazing, but it's above average for these types of scripts.

Prestashop is an E-Commerce script that I've seen around but haven't actually used before so I can't make a recommendation one way or the other. Based solely on their website it looks like it could be OK.